Indian law blamed for Hindu book removal

PENGUIN India publishing house says "intolerant and restrictive" Indian laws have forced it to remove a book from sale after it tried to defend an American author's religious history against objections from a conservative Hindu group.

The publisher's decision this week to pull and pulp all copies of historian Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History shocked writers and intellectuals in India, with some worrying it was a sign of rising intolerance against dissent in the country.

Doniger defended Penguin India in a statement, saying the publisher had battled for four years against a lawsuit filed by the Hindu group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, or the Save Education Movement.

The group objected to the book's describing mythological texts as fictional and, thus, hurting "the religious feelings of millions of Hindus", according to the lawsuit, which also named Doniger and the New York-based arm Penguin Group Inc as defendants.

Penguin India said it "believes, and has always believed, in every individual's right to freedom of thought and expression, a right explicitly codified in the Indian Constitution".

It warned, however, that India's Penal Code "will make it increasingly difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold international standards of free expression".

The code threatens up to three years imprisonment against those who "with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of citizens in India, by words, either spoken or written ... insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious beliefs of that class".

Penguin India said that in settling the four-year lawsuit it was obliged "to respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be".